Hummer in Taipei
Whereas digital noise is usually undesirable in photographs, film grain can give photographs a desired look, particularly with black and white images. The recently released Adobe Photothop Lightroom 3 offers a grain effects feature in the Develop module. Let’s take a look at how it works.
With you image open in the Develop module, look on the right hand side for the Effects panel. At the top of the panel is the Post-Crop Vignetting feature and below that is Grain. You’ll see three sliders under Grain, one for Amount, one for Size and one for Roughness. As mentioned above, grain is generally desirable in conjunction with black and white photography, so if your image is in color, make a quick black and white conversion first. There’s no reason why you can’t do it in color if you want to, so don’t feel you absolutely have to make the conversion.
Okay, back to the sliders. Amount and Size are fairly obvious. Amount is simply how much grain you want in the final image, from no grain with the slider all the way to the left, to lots of grain all the way right. Each image will differ as will each photographer’s ideas, but if you’re using the grain tool, you’ll probably want to be somewhere between the extremes. I personally find that anything over about 50-60 looks weird and generally feel that keeping yourself in the range of 20-40 is all you need.
Size is quite obviously the size of the grain itself. With the slider to the left, your grain will be like a pinprick, to the right more like a smudge. Like amount, too much to either extreme looks kinda weird, and the 20-40 range serves me well here too. This is subjective though, so don’t be afraid to experiment until you get a suitable effect.
Finally, the roughness slider. With the slider all the way left, the grain is sharply defined and crisp looking. All the way right, it’s quite blurry. Best results seem to come somewhere in the middle of this one, probably in the 40-60 range although as before, it’s subjective.
Grain set to 20
Grain set to 100
Don’t forget there’s a before and after toggle button at the top of the panel so you can make easy comparisons between the altered and unaltered image. If you find yourself using similar settings on a range of photos, you might want to consider saving them as a develop preset.
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